Amy Nathan
Artist Statement
My painted, faceted sculptures begin with the act of applying pressure to images and language, cracking open their systems, making them tactile, and distending them into an expanded space. Made of adaptable modular forms, my sculptures employ tautness and slack, flexibility and rigidity, counterweight, draping and propping up—simple machines with palpable physical properties. Putting ideas and materials through the wringer, taking-apart-and-bringing-back-together has become my research and my practice. Through these processes I discover how chosen images or words operate, and communicate what is embedded or compressed within.
While at Headlands
At Headlands I will continue working with some new threads in my practice responding to site and language. My sculptures only fully become themselves when I place them or consider them within a context. The origin of the word “consider” is “to observe the stars,” and there is something constellation-like in my sculptures that repeat and rhyme, map a space, and become a kind of text or narrative of themselves. I am looking forward to the time and space to keep making work that doesn’t have to make perfect sense, but that does carry an undercurrent of logic.